My work focuses on psychedelic dreamscapes generated from the disorientation between physiological space and physical space, specifically through children’s eyes and bodies. I inject my paintings with autobiographical narratives through the use of anthropomorphic animals, fractured bodies, and other signifiers in undefined spaces. These juxtapositions represent the discordance caused by isolation and disconnection.

 Through the use of romantic, introspective metaphors, such as shadows, reflections, and windows, I dive into my personal memories. The three places I call home—Suriname, the Netherlands, and New York—come together in a fictional psychological landscape, where colonial relations have collapsed yet identity and race still must be performed. By playing with cultural markers and stereotypes that are often read and (mis)understood in different ways, multiple self portraits can appear. Indonesian ghost stories from rural Suriname about shape shifting creatures serve as metaphors for my own

 Drawing on historical, political, and personal narratives, my paintings are figurative compositions that conjure the complexity of the Afro-Latinx experience. The figures in my work inhabit a state of vulnerability that often encourages the viewer to question their positions on class, race, and geography. I immigrated to the United States in 2002 from the Dominican Republic.

 My practice challenges the linearity of time. Taking care of a family member with Alzheimer’s, I would often wonder about the impermanence of life. At the same time, she taught me that time is not linear but fluid. Memories bring back time, and different states of mind can make things skip and stop. In my paintings, there is never a single thing happening at the moment but rather many things at the same time. Fleeting moments are portrayed by adding and subtracting paint and lines made by graphite.

 Paintings are records of touch across a surface. To touch is to be touched. To make is to allow yourself to be unmade. This is how I have come to understand the tethered relationship between painting and intimacy in my practice. Through their interaction my body and material make each other visible. Are you looking? A toe dipped into a still pool of water causes a ripple of concentric circles across its surface. Are you looking? A Las Vegas hotel drained their pool when the Black singer Dorothy Dandridge stuck her toe in its water. Does that mean what I touch is made Black?

 Consumer culture and visual culture are two parts of the same runaway train that’s moving faster than ever before. Branding, advertising, and fashion are constantly changing course in an effort to keep up with what’s new, innovative, and hot. Because of my background in graphic design, I’ve witnessed firsthand the inner workings of this corporate-driven gold rush for what’s trending, and my artwork is, in large part, a byproduct of it.

 Through the female lens, my works revolve around the theater of the dinner table, synthesizing mythology and contemporary life. Exploring and expanding identity in response to Jane Bennett’s ideology of “vibrant matter,” and tapping into Donna Harraway’s concept of “open-circuit identity,” these works focus on the relationship between body, object, gender, narrative, and affect. We all must eat. How do the objects we consume and surround ourselves with become a part of our cultural and psychological understanding of self? For me, nothing is more intimate than sharing a meal.

 My artistic practice is influenced by hip-hop music and personal experiences growing up in Columbus, Ohio, LA, and Camden, New Jersey. I consider my process as a type of remixing, similar to how a sound engineer or producer would sample hooks, beats, or choruses to create new music. I collage materials such as Backwoods, Swishers Sweets, magazines, historical archives, and personal memorabilia in conjunction with symbols, colors, and patterns to framework my art.

 I was fourteen when it happened. Awoken one morning by the smell of my biological mother’s cooking in Cameroon (to this day, still the best breakfast of my life), then falling asleep that evening in a foreign land as an “African American.” Suddenly, everything was unfamiliar. The classification of bodies based on skin was not discussed in Cameroon—we were just humans in spaces. It was the first time the color of my skin affected the color of my suit.

  Clothing is a language that speaks for people before they even say a word. As an immigrant in America seeking a sense of belonging, however, I often dress to blend in, and so I feel that my wardrobe has a limited vocabulary. I’ve silenced a part of my true self that I’m curious to rediscover. In wondering what person I would become if I didn’t care about the unspoken rules of dress and behavior, I came up with the solution to paint myself in borrowed outfits and accessories on canvases, where rules and norms don’t apply.